£13,000 bill to keep killers secret

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Home Office figures - disclosed under the Freedom of Information Act - showed the sum went on legal fees, VAT and other costs.

Strict guidelines restricting media coverage of Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, now both 24, were imposed by the High Court in January 2001 to protect them from revenge attacks.

They were granted an open-ended High Court injunction protecting their anonymity.

Former Family Division President Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss said in the High Court that the two had to be protected due to a "real possibility of serious physical harm and possible death from vengeful members of the public or from the Bulger family".

A Home Office spokeswoman said the spending related to obtaining a specific injunction against a foreign title.

"There are always certain legal costs associated with an injunction from the courts. Costs in this particular case are not out of the ordinary," she said.

"An injunction was obtained in this case to prevent publication of information that would lead to the whereabouts of the two offenders, as there was strong and credible evidence of a threat to their lives."

The pair were aged 10 when they abducted two-year-old James Bulger from outside a butcher's in the Strand shopping precinct in Bootle, Merseyside, in 1993. They walked him more than a mile to a railway line and killed him.

The legal bar on identifying them applies in the UK but it would not necessarily apply to foreign magazines which attempted to track down the murderers and identify them in their new lives.